aaron haurwitz

You need more information about how your users are interacting with your webapp. There are many reasons for this. Chief among them is smugly rubbing your usability predictions in the face of your senior designer. What follows is an easy way to incorporate Google Analytics into your webapp to track usability.

We've all been there. You've got a great idea for a new side project. A couple friends are getting together to start a new venture. Management and Product have come up with The Answer The Market Is Looking For™. I'm talking about the beginning of a new product/feature/thing. If there's anything in common with all new undertakings, it's the desire to build too much at the beginning. This is a problem I see affecting the entire software industry - from pet projects to multi-billion dollar ventures - and all aspects of development - from how we construct the most low-level solutions for requirements to how high-level requirements are constructed.

ebryn/backburner.js is a queueing library that happens to be the heart and soul of the Ember.js internal workflow. Over in the Ember world, this workflow is referred to as the RunLoop. I have put together a fun little example of Backburner to demystify some of its inner workings and to shed light on how other frameworks put it to use.

Do you have things to say? Do you have a message for the world? Are you seeking a vessel to express this divine inspiration? Do you feel like blurting out this message at the top right corner of the screen in a fancy way? Then you may need to consider growl-like notifications in your webapp.

Out of the box, Disqus is made to work with request/response websites that load a fresh html document for every page of the site. That doesn't mean that it can't work with an ajax webapp that refreshes only part of the DOM whenever changing pages. Here's how I have accomplished it with my ember.js-powered blog to add no-maintenance commenting. Even if you are an Angular fanboi, or (heaven forbid) one of those savage jQuery do-it-yourselfers, the concepts here will apply to you too. You'll just have to figure out the equivalent hooks in your framework/library of choice. Be strong; be brave.

As awesome as Google's crawlbot is, it doesn't view your website like a real human does. If your page requires ajax requests to fire and javascript code to populate the DOM in order to view anything useful, Google won't see that. Here's how I've solved this problem for this blog.

This first entry is a meta-post of sorts - a description of the architecture of this blog. Anyone can sign up for a free wordpress or tumblr account and begin their logorrhea within seconds, but where's the fun in that?